August 15, 2009

If you used PHP on Apache, whether on Centos, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc., you probably noticed PHP gets slower as most modern PHP framework gets bigger in sizes, more layers, increasing database records, etc.

Then, try to install FREE php accelerator called APC (Alternative PHP Cache).
APC is a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code.
In other words, APC will compile PHP code automatically, and can give a boost to your site without modification, 2, 5, 10 and perhaps even more performance boost.

One time I had mediawiki, and it was getting really slow, and after installing APC, it’s about 5 times faster.

June 30, 2009

You probably do not want to open FTP as it’s insecure, and open up SFTP, for example, you want your dreamweaver users’ SFTP option. But, the problem here is that, SFTP uses SSH, which will give entire Linux / directory. You want to disable SSH shell access, but, enable SFTP to their home directory only.

First, you need latest version of OpenSSH (5.2 at this moment) for ChrootDirectory option to work.

If you try # yum install openssh, and it may give option of 4.2 only, then, you have to install OpenSSH 5.2 manually.
See this post on how to install OpenSSH 5.2 yourself.

Now that you have at least OpenSSH 5.2, let’s modify /etc/ssh/sshd_config